Masters of our fate, captains of our soul

Power. That’s what it’s all about, insist the bad-mouthers these days. The abuse of power. At one time they would bang on about the “innocence” of childhood, but that doesn’t play too well when talking about kids into a double-figure age or their early teens.

Bullshit. It’s not about power, it’s about the physical dimension of love, which inspires benevolent and nurturant feelings. That’s always been my response, based mainly on my own introspection and knowledge of really nice guys who are attracted to children, and a few women too.

But a few inconvenient realities have been insinuating themselves into my consciousness lately which have obliged me to concede there is an issue for serious discussion. The clincher for this as a blog topic right now is an article in TheNew Yorker this week called “The Master”. It is one of those enormous feature-length (nay, novella-length) pieces of prestigious reportage in which this journal specializes: around 13,000 words on the fresh and previously unexplored (hardly!) issue of child sexual abuse.

I groaned inwardly, I must admit, at the thought of having to tackle this “must read” saga, but I’m glad I gritted my teeth and got on with it. And to save you the trouble of doing the same (unless you are particularly masochistic!), here’s the gist. The strap-line is as good a start as any: “A charismatic teacher enthralled his students. Was he abusing them?” The teacher in question, now an old man who (sensibly enough) has declined to talk The New Yorker, wasn’t even mentioned last June when the New York Times Magazine published extensive allegations of sexual abuse at the private, expensive, and very highly rated Horace Mann School in the Bronx, New York, by several teachers decades ago, leading to a police investigation. Under state law the offences fell afoul of the time limit for prosecutions, so no charges have been laid. As with the Savile case in Britain, though, publicity resulted in many more “victims” coming forward, armed with lawyers and seeking compensation (what a surprise!) from around a dozen teachers who allegedly perpetrated abuse. The school is said to have agreed terms recently and is ready to offer an apology.

So far, so ordinary. But the career of the “charismatic” teacher on which Marc Fisher’s story for The New Yorker focuses is anything but. Fisher is himself a former student at the school, having been in the Class of 1976, which is when he encountered a teacher of English called Robert Berman, an “odd, secretive man who frightened away many students, yet retired to a house that former students bought for him”. Fisher says, “I talked to more than a hundred alumni, to many teachers who worked with him in the sixties and seventies, and to administrators who dealt with complaints about teachers. Berman stood out for his extraordinary control over boys’ lives…”

What this “extraordinary control” amounted to, as we hear in immense and very convincing detail, is that Berman was a demanding and psychologically domineering teacher. Some boys at what was then an all-boys school, steered clear of the guy: they were allowed to opt out of his class, and Fisher was one of those. But others, the so-called “Bermanites”, were mesmerized by his inspirational teaching: he inspired fear, but also immense respect and loyalty. Berman was unconventional: thinkDead Poets Society, a film in which teacher John Keating dangerously urged his students, “Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.” Berman, like Mr Keating in the film, played so memorably by Robin Williams, was looked upon by the boys as a genius and a hero: “O Captain! My Captain!” they called Keating, and Berman inspired just that sort of sentiment.

Fisher’s allegation, of course, is that Berman became sexually involved with some of his boys. No great ethical problem in itself for us heretics, I would have thought: who better to be a boy’s lover, after all, than an inspirational teacher? Isn’t this the very ideal of mentorship in the “Greek love” model of pederasty? Except that Berman allegedly seized not only the day but the boys as well, often quite forcefully and without waiting for any sign of consent. He would make their compliance with his advances a test of loyalty: those who would not submit were deemed unworthy, fit only for disgrace, humiliation and rejection.

The really interesting point here, though, is that many of these boys did choose to submit, and kept going back for more. They might have had misgivings about the sex, but their worship of Berman outweighed any moral reservations or physical distaste. So did these teenagers (not little boys) become consenting participants, or were they truly victims of Berman’s power abuse? They could have chosen to leave Berman’s class, as many did. But many others stayed, including boys who got love and attention from Berman they did not necessarily get from their parents or anyone else, at a time when they needed it. So shouldn’t their choice to “go for it” be respected?

Even those who now, in middle-age, claim they were Berman’s victims seem ambivalent. Berman gave a boy called Gene a small bronze sculpture. Despite everything, Gene holds onto it to this day. “This meant that somebody loved me, and nobody had ever shown me that before,” Gene says. “It’s a conundrum. Why don’t I just drop it in the garbage right now? It’s part of me, part of my life. I guess I’ll be done with it when I don’t need somebody’s love.” Significantly, it is said that Gene only came to “realize” he had been abused after a therapist “helped him understand that he had never had a real relationship with Berman.”

Berman, not surprisingly, has denied that any of this happened. He may be telling the truth, but that not the issue here. The issue for us is what we think is right and good in such a situation. To my mind, by the way, this is not like Penn State, with which the Horace Mann School revelations have been compared. The “charismatic” figure in that case, football coach Jerry Sandusky, turns out not at all to have been the brutal abuser the prosecution sought to portray: he got a long sentence on the back of public outrage, but there was no evidence of rape in a shower room, as originally alleged, and even the “victims” had many good things to say about him.

Berman, by contrast, was plausibly a bit of a bastard; an inspired bastard but a bastard nonetheless. His cult-leader style had arguably produced the sort of fear-based loyalty we associate with Stockholm syndrome. But consider this: Berman and his ilk would be just as sinister even if there had been nothing sexual going on at all! We probably all remember nasty teachers of that sort: bullies, simply. Such people are not considered candidates for jail at all, so let’s keep a sense of proportion.
I do think there is a serious issue here, though, for those who cleave to the elitist Greek love model of the mentor, and the mentor’s unquestioned power: elitist pursuit of pedagogical excellence can be a marvellous thing, and one we have to some extent lost in the more egalitarian atmosphere of modern education, especially in the UK. But perhaps it needs to be blended with another concept borrowed, along with that of the mentor, from the Ancient Greeks: the philosophy of moderation in all things.

An element of leadership, and hero worship, can be tremendously positive, and none the worse for being sexually realized. But no one should monopolize a child’s life; there should be light and air in the classroom, both metaphorically and actually: it is more than coincidental that Berman papered over the windows of his classroom door so that no one could peek through into his exclusive sphere of influence.

Another intense, dark, forcing-house of young minds is relevant here, another example from cinema: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, from the novel by Muriel Spark. The eponymous Miss Brodie, played by Maggie Smith, is an inspirational teacher (motto: “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life”) in the 1930s, who romanticizes fascist leaders such as Mussolini and Franco, with ultimately disastrous consequences for one of her girls. Miss Brodie is hugely manipulative, and there is lots of sexual intrigue, but not in terms of Miss Brodie’s interest in the girls: she has adult lovers. The point here is that the really dangerous thing is not sex but the excessive influence (the word power misses the mark) of an essentially reckless woman over her young charges. This is a danger for all adults who have close relationships with children, but perhaps it is a particular issue for advocates of intense personal mentorship, whether erotically charged and realized or not.

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I have been thinking of this post of yours in the light of a recent post to the Pervocracy blog called ‘Love is More Destructive than Sex’ (search for it, I probably shouldn’t link). While I can’t agree with much of what the author and many commenters are saying, I think they do have a point. With the best will in the world, you can’t get round the fact that a fifteen-year-old girl and a forty-year-old man will inevitably have different conceptions of love, particularly romantic love. Even if the older partner behaves impeccably, which is sadly far from a given, heartbreak may well result. I think this is one reason among many why the data on man-girl relationships are less positive than the data on man-boy relationships. Most teenage boys are heterosexual, and a heterosexual teenaged boy, while he may love an adult male partner very much, is almost certainly not going to fall romantically in love with him. If he does fall head over heels, believe it’s forever, do risky and damaging things to be with his beloved, and then get his heart crushed when the relationship goes south, the beloved is probably going to be a girl of his own age.

The study ‘Internet-Initiated Sex Crimes against Minors’ (http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/pdf/CV71.pdf) puts paid to many pernicious myths, but not all is rosy. In these “sex crime” relationships, typically between a girl aged 13-15 and a man older than 25, half of the kids were described as being in love with or otherwise feeling close bonds with the adults. The adults, however, not infrequently lied to the kids: some shaved a few years off their age, which isn’t so bad, but some insincerely professed love in order to get sex, which, for all that many men and some women have been doing it since time immemorial, can be pretty bad under these circumstances. Sure, some kids might see right through that, but others…Imagine this scenario: a thirteen-year-old has trouble making friends at school because she is shy and sensitive and has geeky interests, so she seeks out friends online. Lo and behold, she meets a great guy who understands her and takes her seriously. She falls head over heels in love, is told she’s loved back, she believes it, they have sex, everything’s great. Nobody ever finds out, so the relationship is left to run its course. Eventually, inevitably, she finds out that he never really loved her. Maybe she’s strong enough by now to write him off as a jerk and move on, but maybe she’s shattered and has lasting difficulty with trust in relationships.

That’s one possible scenario, but not the only one, of course. In this interview from Paidika magazine https://www.ipce.info/ipceweb/Library/heidi.htm the young woman describes how heartbroken she was as a thirteen-year-old when her female teacher put a stop to their relationship, but she doesn’t seem to have sustained lasting damage and these days she remembers her teacher and the relationship with affection and warmth, not rancour. The companion piece, which isn’t online but which I have somewhere, is an interview with a lesbian in her thirties who had a relationship with a girl aged 13-15. In this case, it was the girl who started the relationship and who then, eighteen months later, broke it off, having changed a great deal in that short period, as children will — and it was her older lover who was left heartbroken. Clearly the difference between two people of such different ages doesn’t always work to the advantage of the elder. The woman also explains that she was very conscious of the responsibility that was on her shoulders in a relationship with someone so young and inexperienced, and that she took great care with her young girlfriend. Indeed, she says that she would not want to be in a relationship with someone so young again, because the responsibility is so heavy. I’m sure there are men like her out there having positive relationships with young girls; it’s a pity they get statistically swamped by the jerks and the merely inconsiderate and careless. Or the desperate — one strong argument for lifting legal restrictions on adult-minor sex is that MAPs will be less likely to feel they must do whatever they have to do in order to hold onto their only chance at sex with a child, and thus be less likely to let kids get away with murder, on the one hand, or to lie kids into sex, on the other.

Some time ago, someone posted to Ask Metafilter in a state of great concern over her seventeen-year-old daughter’s online friendship with a man in his thirties. One poster responded, anonymously, that she had been in such a relationship:

“…it was the 1990s so the age of consent in Ontario was still only 14 (he checked!) and I was 13 or 14 when we started talking on a BBS, and 15 when I (consentually) lost my virginity to him (29ish)…My parents never knew about the relationship (and we were local to each other so no secret trips needed to be arranged, especially in the summer). I shudder to think of the sh*tstorm that would have arisen if they had. …it definitely started from a mutual interest in computers and networks and ham radio, and to be honest, I couldn’t even tell you who initiated the romantic side of things or when. …

“I still (20 odd years later) don’t feel like a victim from my relationship. This is even though I realized how much of a creep he was when after I broke up with him (at 17 or so, I honestly grew out of him) he started chatting with my 13! year! old! sister on another board. It was at that point that I started to threaten him (with both humiliating revelations, and violence) and he backed off from both our lives. The point of that rambling is that I felt empowered through the whole relationship, and had no desire for my parents to “save me” from him, and would have hated them if they had (though I probably would have castrated him if he had touched my sister).”

We can see who had the power in that relationship! While we would be foolish to assume that such situations are the norm in teen girl-adult man relationships, since the data tend to suggest that they are not, we shouldn’t forget that they can happen, either.

Interesting blog on pervocracy that you refer to, about love being potentially more destructive than sex.
Think how much more difficult all this can be if the girl is, say, only 10. The difference in expectations is like being on different planets and the older person just has to get this. Quite a job if you rather unhelpfully happen to have fallen deeply in love. But I continue to hope there is a way to deal with this expectation disparity that doesn’t involve us all flitting off to be Virtuous Pedophiles 🙂

“The one love is mad for pleasure; the other loves beauty. The one is an involuntary sickness; the other is a sought enthusiasm. The one tends to the good of the beloved; the other to the ruin of both. The one is virtuous; the other incontinent in all its acts. The one has its end in friendship; the other in hate. The one is freely given; the other is bought and sold. The one brings praise; the other blame. The one is Greek; the other is barbarous. The one is virile; the other effeminate. The one is firm and constant; the other light and variable. The man who loves the one love is a friend of God, a friend of law, fulfilled of modesty, and free of speech. He dares to court his friend in daylight, and rejoices in his love. He wrestles with him in the playground and runs with him in the race, goes afield with him to the hunt, and in battle fights for glory at his side. In his misfortune he suffers, and at his death he dies with him. He needs no gloom of night, no desert place, for this society. The other lover is a foe to heaven, for he is out of tune and criminal; a foe to law, for he transgresses law. Cowardly, despairing, shameless, haunting the dusk, lurking in desert places and secret dens, he would fain be never seen consorting with his friend, but shuns the light of day, and follows after night and darkness, which the shepherd hates, but the thief loves.”

Yes, and I too remain ill-inclined to disagree per se with the case as it is presented, and we have been through all this; time and again.

As yet it is all far too abstract; all ifs and buts.

I do disagree that there is any such thing as a teeneger. When I was that age there was no such thing, but good young men with an opinion and a sense of themself, the backward shift coming about through post-WWII Hollywood.

I had this very argument with my own boys and their friends not quite 15 years ago, after one of them who’d been for years happy to gad about the house naked suddenly started locking the bathroom door, because now he had his pubes, and the rest of them regardless came complaining to me that [the boy] had locked the bathroom door.

The background to such anomaly, as I have written at length, is informed only too well by the imperial mass transportation of boys and young men to the colonies; boys and young men wanting only for someone to love them, and respect them and appreciate them, and finding someone in the event settled unknowingly into an historically anomalous space that has only recently begun to be explored as ‘deviant’ . . . blah blah blah . . .

The task ahead, as I yet insist, is to return to normal. Finally.

The question is, what is normal and how is it to be renegotiated, in the next generation and the next and the next?

To my mind if Berman “seized not only the day but the boys as well, often quite forcefully and without waiting for any sign of consent … and those who would not submit were deemed unworthy, fit only for disgrace, humiliation and rejection.” then for me that man is a child abuser.

The topic is germane as I recently became aware of a similar, albeit milder, teacher-pupil dynamic. The boys, unlike Berman’s charges, were a good deal younger and not native English speakers, so in many ways less able to say no to unwanted advances. I should add that the boys live in a society that is historically more tolerant to inter-generational relationships of a certain kind between man and boy than in the West. But, the modus operandi was similar to that allegedly employed by the “psychologically domineering” Berman. The nationality of the teacher was the same, and his subject was English too.

“The issue for us is what we think is right and good in such a situation.” Having always found boys sexually attractive, I relish consensual relationships between man and boy, but for me, the key word here is consensual. However, in the two cases above, mutual pleasure has been replaced by a contract, the terms of which force powerless boys to meet obligations imposed by the single individual who has all the power. To me that is the difference between boylove and child abuse.

“To my mind if Berman “seized not only the day but the boys as well, often quite forcefully and without waiting for any sign of consent … and those who would not submit were deemed unworthy, fit only for disgrace, humiliation and rejection.” then for me that man is a child abuser.”

Yes, I agree with this and with the spirit of your thoughtful post as a whole. No doubt we would also agree that a woman is abused if she is “kept in line” by a bullying or violent husband, no matter how much she loves him and wants the relationship to continue. But we do not deny the woman the right to continue making the (seemingly) bad choice of staying with such a partner, even though we might do our best to counsel her out of it. I’m not sure we should deny a teenager the right to stick with a bullying but inspirational teacher, either, especially when (even if they are mistaken about the adult’s sentiments) they feel loved as a result, and happen to be in deep need of feeling loved.

I agree with Tom on this. If instead of seducing him, the dominating teacher were to influence his teenage pupil into studying hard for a bright future, no one would say it was wrong even if meant the boy in question had to fight his natural laziness. I would suggest that the tendency of conscientious boylovers to agonise over the quality and motives for a boy’s consent is a misplaced salve for their conscience over the real difference between the two situations: what the conscientious are truly worrying about is that in a sexual relationship the teacher may be obtaining a selfish personal gratification not comparable with what he would get out of his pupil’s academic success and that this might make him fool the boy into believing he has more to offer as more attractive than he really has.

A relationship cannot logically be termed non-consensual just because the parties to it are obtaining different benefits. All else being equal, it is certainly preferable that a boy consenting to sex with a man should be burning with lust to go to bed with him, but all else not being equal, a sexually indifferent boy motivated by the need for love and other benefits may well get more out of it than one who simply wants to relieve his horniness. One might go further and argue that nature/evolution has made teenagers sexually attractive in the minds of men so that they can obtain, not satisfaction of their own lust, but protection by men and training in the skills needed for survival.

Suggesting a teenager should not be allowed to exercise his own judgement in consenting to sex in a relationship he finds beneficial for non-sexual reasons is no less oppressive than any other invasion of his autonomy by strangers, and is a false solution to the problem of his lover’s possible selfishness. Measures to protect against the latter should be much more pertinent than this.

Edmund, your comment about this obsession with consent is astute and an issue I have seen all too often, especially among younger boylovers. From the unrelenting media and societal harping on the “harm” that pedophiles do to children, even when they don’t believe it they feel they must outdo the childsavers themselves and talk about how they would never harm a child and how even the slightest hesitation on the part of a boy must be considered “non-consent.”

One mental health need I have identified among boylovers is to be more forgiving of themselves as they will tend to blow every slight imperfection out of proportion. They may berate themselves, or anyone else for that matter, if they might have done anything that may have violated their young friend’s consent while all that is equitably required is to walk away, or likewise engage, when and if either party so chooses.

Tom, I also entered the long read of this media piece in The New Yorker. I have yet to go back to it, but I do recall the text well. There is this riddle that is placed before us when a person of skill and insight offers up a complexity that disturbs. In our current social and cultural climate no level of giftedness, not artistic merit, no genius, is able to stand once an accusation of sexual assault is tabled.

In my own country sexual ‘freedoms’ are framed with an age of consent set at 16 years. However any adult who enters a friendship that includes sexual intimacy while being a teacher or having a role similar to this can allow this age to be a guide, for them the age of consent is 18. Having seen, and I think correctly, that closeness in the learning context is able to take such this path, the door is closed firmly. Tom, you refer to notions of power, in my opinion those debates have made age of consent a poor guide for what is deemed socially acceptable. Mere age disparity is viewed as a trigger for concern now.

A text I read in the early 1990s made me aware of the history of this attitude in European and Anglophone cultures. During the early 20th century in Germany the issue of ‘pedagogical Eros became a matter of media interest. Gustav Wyneken (1875-1964) of Wickersdorf Free School Community was put under the torch light, being found guilty of acts of vice with minors in 1921. It can be argued the Platonic model was superseded by the medico-sexological model, one that has held sway up until our own time.

This situation is discussed in a book I view as a ground-breaking text in its day. Here are the details for the chapter that discusses Wyneken’s case: